The exhibit in the Atelier Gallery is the culmination of a 12-week portfolio-building course, taught annually by Karen Davis at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, north of Boston. Fiv...

» Read more

X

If you go

The exhibit in the Atelier Gallery is the culmination of a 12-week portfolio-building course, taught annually by Karen Davis at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, north of Boston. Five of the 15 in this 19th annual class have Cape ties. You can visit the museum or see samples of the exhibit online.

At first, the images displayed by Cape artists at the Griffin Museum of Photography seem to have little in common.

But step back for a moment. Chat with the photographers. Study the disparate photographs they have made and watch the common denominator slowly coalesce.

To the viewer, the photographers all, independently, play with time to find the truth of a moment or a lifetime of moments.

Motivated by a chance to do high school over again and feel herself fit in better, artist Lora Brody photographs and interviews women with whom she graduated in 1963. Of 40 women asked to participate, 36 agreed. Brody's 60-by-80-inch print shows 13 of the women's high school pictures side-by-side with Brody's recent portraits. Words around the oversized print list historical events of the last half-century as well as mentions of how the women saw themselves in high school and how they see themselves now. Common themes, Brody says, were gratitude for living this long and regret on nearing the journey's end.

Gail Samuelson also chose an oversized print so, she says, people would feel like they were walking into it. Using a 4-by-5-inch film camera with a long exposure time, she manages to put what might be described as a vibration into the scene, making the viewer feel as if he or she is walking the dog near that beaver dam with Samuelson.

Bob Avakian's "Between Night and Day" uses a four-minute exposure time to gather bits of light that the naked eye cannot see once darkness has fallen. The slowly taken photograph turns stars in the night sky into shooting stars moving above a meadow. Avakian says he is often surprised at what the camera captures in darkness.

Light plays a different role in Andrea Rosenthal's series of photos about healing from the loss of five friends. A pillar of light settled against a rumpled bed makes it feel as if a spectral being has come to rest. Everyday objects remain the same in the face of devastating loss, but shifting light shows the impermanence of life. Rosenthal says she tries to show her own emotions in a way that taps into the experience of others.

Time is a more direct player in Jane Paradise's chronicle of the life of her 100-year-old mother-in-law, Ada. Time is expressed in the landscape of Ada's neck, in the antiquity of things that were new when Ada first acquired them.

The singer Jim Croce lamented his inability to save time in a bottle. In this exhibit, artists save time in a camera.

A sixth Cape artist, Miren Etcheverry of Truro, is also exhibiting in the Atelier 19 show, running through March 30 at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester.

In her artist statement, Etcheverry writes:

"Color is what first attracts me to the objects and their surroundings that I discover in boutique and gallery window displays. Then, it is the whimsical and enigmatic that entice me. With these as my subject, through selection, framing and positioning, I compose images that suggest the symbols, personifications and anthropomorphisms that visit us in our dreams. I title each image in “Looking In” with the universal archetype it brings to mind, like Jung's everyman/woman, innocent, jester, magician, lover, caretaker, villain, sage, explorer. As in our dreams, the interpretations and meanings of these narratives lie with you, the beholder."